The Ecosystem Services Benchmark (ESB) was tested on 31 companies in the food, beverage and tobacco sectors in the UK, Brazil, the USA, Australia, Switzerland, Malaysia, the Netherlands and France. Collectively these companies represented a market capitalization of over Euro 790 billion at 15th September 2009. These sectors are amongst those that are most dependent on ecosystem services, but also have the potential to have a significant impact on biodiversity.

The sample (listed below) combines multinational companies with Brazilian based companies as a means of creating a snapshot through the supply chain. Brazil was selected as a focus for the pilot as financial institutions within the country are increasingly active on environmental risk and the country plays a vital role in the global food web and is responsible for 25% of the world’s food production.

The results were used to review the ESB and fine-tune it for use by the wider investment community. See ‘NVI toolkit.’ for the final tool and for a summary of the results of our analysis which are being used by our investor collaborators to inform their engagement with the companies above.